Inventions and Revisions

Review by

Michael Malouf

Columbia University

Copyright (c) 1997 by Michael Malouf, all rights reserved. This text may be used and
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When W.B. Yeats asks "Did that play of mine send out / Certain men the English
shot?" in his 1938 poem "The Man and the Echo," he is reflecting on his part in a cultural
revolution which came to an unambiguous fruition in the Easter Rising of 1916. Fifty
years later the contemporary poet Paul Muldoon responds to Yeats's famous line with the
cynicism: "If Yeats had saved his pencil-lead / would certain men have stayed in bed?"
(Selected Poems , 134). This debate over the role of the art and the artist in
society is central to many contemporary postcolonial societies. In Inventing
Ireland , Declan Kiberd attempts to comprehend the distance from Yeats's romantic
nationalism to Muldoon's postmodern irony by tracing the affinitive relationship Ireland
has with other postcolonial countries who have felt the vicissitudes of political
independence. As part of the Converges series edited by Edward Said,
Inventing Ireland surveys Irish literature and culture from the 1870s to the
present in order to show how each generation has reconceived its national culture and
identity. It is Kiberd's thesis that with the loss of their language during the nineteenth
century the Irish have had to continuously re-invent themselves in the twentieth. Thus, it is
possible for the "Ireland" conceived by Yeats's revival to be re-written by later generations
as a distant and very different cousin.

Cursed with the misfortune of being a white European settler colony that has been a
member of the European Community since 1973, Ireland was an anomaly in early
postcolonial discussion and received little attention, for example, in the landmark text, The
Empire Writes Back (1989). The situation has changed in recent years with the creation of
a native body of criticism that has helped to introduce Ireland as a precursor to the
postcolonial societies of the second half of the twentieth century. In contrast, Kiberd, a
professor of English at the University College, Galway, suggests that Ireland should no
longer simply congratulate itself as a 'model' to these societies (enacting first-world
presumption as a result), but should learn from them as well. The idea that postcolonial
criticism offers a useful method for reading Irish cultural history is evident in
his thesis about the role of language. This argument (which has appeared most recently in
Joseph Lee's Ireland: Politics and Society 1912-1985 and in the plays of Brian Friel)
suggests that the loss of the Irish language had as much to do with the Irish themselves
jettisoning the tongue for the promise of social advancement (especially in America) as it
had to do with punitive measures by the English. The resulting crisis of identity has only
been resolved through a glorification of a past that even most recent historians declare
difficult to know in its entirety. Kiberd's idea of an Ireland that has been "invented, " then,
is a statement about the reading of history in a postcolonial setting.

Irish attitudes toward their own history resemble many of the complexities of other
postcolonial societies. Since independence, there have been three main strains which are
akin to the phases of decolonization described by Fanon in The Wretched of the
Earth . The first is a sort of fundamentalist, bourgeois strain associated with Eamon
de Valera (who instituted these attitudes as part of the 1937 constitution), which identifies
Ireland as a Catholic country founded on vague patriotic principles such as family values
and the unity of the island's thirty-two counties. The second, more militantly republican,
version involves acting on these principles. Because both are remnants of the Civil War
over the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty signed by the Free Government, they each have a stake in
preserving an uncritical history of the struggle for political independence, most
notably the rebellion of 1916 and the Irish revival founded by Yeats. The third strain of
historical writing is identified with the so-called revisionists, including scholars such as
Conor Cruise O'Brien, F.S.L. Lyons and Roy Foster, whose work originated in the 1960s
to counter the myths and excesses of an anglophobic nationalism. Proud of their "realism"
in the face of sacred truths, these historians saw themselves as necessary correctives to an
overweaning nationalist pride; but they also understood that Irish anglophobia must be
overcome to win acceptance into the EC and to woo future multinationals and American
tourists. Still, while denying any political partisanship, some have gone so far as to deny
the term "colonial" outright, preferring instead to see Ireland as a small European nation
like Norway or Sweden -- rather than having allegiances with Algeria or India. What they
have neglected in their pursuit of the facts, according to Kiberd, is the undeniable reality
and usefulness these nationalist histories have had to generations of people.

In terms of reading Irish culture, revisionists have had to use a crowbar to force a
distinction between politics and art. This influence is evident in the essays of Seamus
Heaney and, most recently, in Dermot Bolger's introduction to the Vintage Book of
Contemporary Irish Fiction (1995) where he sees the designation of "postcolonial
literature" as a "decomposing chicken" unfairly "foisted upon the backs of younger writers"
(xiii). Bolger's attitude is one that imagines a kind of postmodern "end of history" where
the issues of colonialism can be--or should be--relegated to the previous generation as an
anachronism. The revisionist view of history is summed up by Muldoon: "For history's a
twisted root / with art its small, translucent fruit // and never the other way round." Within
this revisionist scope, the Irish revival of Yeats, Synge, and Lady Gregory has been
perceived as an anomaly (how on earth could the fruit come before the tree?) propagated by
a bourgeois class who found in a disappearing Gaelic culture a source for self-promotion.
Wary that nationalist sentiment is necessarily sympathetic with IRA terrorism, most
revisionists conclude that the revival, despite its admiration from other cultures, is an
embarassment.

It is through this ideological mine-field, a revival uncritically celebrated by nationalists
and dismissed condescendingly by revisionists, that Kiberd steps most nimbly and expertly
in his book. Kiberd usefully borrows from Fanon his theses on the nationalist and
liberationist phases of political independence in order to critique "narrow-gauge"
nationalism while not falling into the opposite, equally reductionist, camp. According to
Kiberd, the "invention of Ireland" resulted partly from Matthew Arnold's attempt to create
Ireland into a "little England," the repository of an emotional life foresaken in the process
of empire-building. Within this Oedipal paradigm Kiberd's method seeks to "write back"
to England by showing how inventions of Ireland have contributed to concepts of
"Englishness." This allows him to stretch the definitions of the postcolonial artist so that
Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw are seen as expressing the contradictions of the
writer from the periphery living in the metropolis, and the seventeenth-century Gaelic
writer Seathrún Céitinn (Geoffrey Keating) is referred to as the "Edward Said of his era."
Kiberd brings together disparate texts that critique English justifications of imperialism--
from Shaw's Saint Joan and Wilde's Importance of Being
Earnest to Céitinn's Tri Biorghaoithe an Bhais (which was a response
to Edmund Spenser's racist View of the Present State of Ireland ). In his analysis of the age
of Shaw, Wilde, and Yeats, Kiberd's scope is wide and varied, devoted to showing how
once
revolutionary texts where translated into a docile 'revival' that was safe for public
consumption.

In a page taken from Fanon, Kiberd argues that it was through the use of archaic forms
that the revival was able to broach modern radicalism. Against revisionists who criticize
the 1916 uprising as the work of "deluded poets," Kiberd shows how revolutionaries like
Arthur Griffith, Patrick Pearse, and James Connolly cloaked the principles of a modern,
independent, welfare state in the garb of the past. It is the strength of his criticism that this
association of the "archaic and the avant garde" (as Terry Eagleton describes it), is made
not just for Joyce's Ulysses but for the breadth of Irish culture during the revivalist period.
Through this expanded reading of culture and society, Kiberd is able to see Yeats as a
revolutionary--not of the strident romanticizing sort propagated by nationalists--but as a
poet whose own style embodies the desires and doubts of an entire revolutionary period.
In his strongest reading of all, Kiberd reads Synge as a syncretic artist
whose work stands as a model for a new kind of Irish--and postcolonial--artist who can blend the best of the Continent with the native culture. Kiberd is able to make the
revival respectable again by noting both the movement's limitations as well as its raw
visionary potential which, when it was set in motion, had a seismic effect throughout the
British empire.

However, Kiberd is not able to overcome the difficulty which every Irish historian
faces, and that is how to explain what happens to this potential once independence is
achieved. Like most socialist republicans, Kiberd believes that the integrity of the revival
was lost with the abandonment of the socialism by the first republican government and the
subsequent conservatism (some would say fascism) of the de Valera regime from 1936 into
the 1960s. It is when he no longer has a commanding personality like Yeats or dramatic
events like the more recent "Troubles" upon which to focus that Kiberd's fast-paced, anecdotal style becomes
more of a survey than analysis. This is not helped by the inclusion of italicized
"Interchapters," which are designed to give an overview of the political and social climate of
the era to be discussed in the following chapters but which only create a muddle. They
suggest a jarring division between politics and art which is especially awkward in a text that
argues against this view by revisionist historians and old-school literary critics. This
division becomes more amorphous as certain artists tend to show up in the italics,
while chapters like the fine "Periphery and the Center" have less to do with specific artists
as they are examples of sociology. The interchapters act as a supplement to the narrative
structure Kiberd imposes on Irish history, a structure which ultimately runs counter to the
theory he presents of Ireland as an "idea" which is always uncertain of itself. In his desire
to preserve textually a distinction he argues against theoretically Kiberd reveals an
ambiguity about the actual relationship between politics and art: he is, like the revivalists,
cautious of the revolutionary potential his own work suggests.

By relegating the Northern writers Patrick Kavanagh and Louis MacNeice to the
"periphery" of an interchapter Kiberd misses the influence these writers have on
contemporary artists from the North. In fact, what is regretably missing from his survey is
the Ireland imagined from Belfast. He devotes attention to Heaney and Friel, and while he
is more critical of the former than most American or English critics seem capable, Friel's
work (especially Translations ) becomes a kind of touchstone for his own analysis. Yet
one has to wonder why the Field Day organization--which was crucial to revitalizing
debates on Irish culture in the 1980s and which Kiberd took part in--is only mentioned in
passing.

Nonetheless, it is to his credit that Kiberd is neither a revivalist nor is he offering yet
another version of "what happened on Easter, 1916." His analysis is designed to be
contrapuntal, in the sense described by Said in Culture and Imperialism as "an alternative
both to a politics of blame and to the even more destructive politics of confrontation and
hostility" (18). As a result, he is able to conclude his work with practical suggestions for
Ireland's spiritual and economic recovery with provocative ideas that clearly emanate from
his analysis. This type of criticism usefully expands the dialogue -- both inside and
outside academia -- on the nature and meaning of Irishness in this century. My only
reservation is that the book, in its nearly 700 pages, will exhaust most of those readers for
whom these suggestions would be most helpful. If so, it would be a shame; as events in
the North last July made clear, it is time that the Irish-Anglo stalemate was seen by a third
perspective other than that of the United States. By emphasizing that Ireland has a
lot to learn from other postcolonial societies, Declan Kiberd's Inventing Ireland is a valuable contribution to Irish--and British--studies.